In the Flesh: Eight for Silver (Patreon)

How do you take a premise like the lycanthrophy-afflicted son of a land baron feeding off his father’s tenants and totally fail to do anything approaching class analysis? Whatever the secret to that particular trick, Eight for Silver knows it. It takes a setup perfectly primed to take a bloody mouthful out of the working poor’s relationship to their social superiors and wastes it completely on an inert performance by Boyd Holbrook as Sad Dead Wife (Also Dead Child) Guy. It boggles the mind what director Sean Ellis was thinking when Alistair Petrie is right there, ten times as charismatic, his character more directly tied to the themes the film makes a few limp attempts at engaging. A few pretty compositions, one standout set piece in which an entire massacre occurs onscreen in an unmoving and unbroken distance shot, and Eight for Silver is completely spent. It’s like sliding into bed with an Adonis only for him to come in forty seconds flat and fall asleep.

The film’s ghostly visions and Foley work are generic to the point of embarrassment. You have your requisite scary whispers and stutter-stop jerky specters, none of them connected to a single actual emotion or developed character, some architectural creaks and moans, and a dreary piece of scarecrow horror that was shopworn when Pumpkinhead did it in 1988. It’s like Ellis wanted to make eight different horror movies, none terribly interesting, and instead just slotted them next to each other like a slideshow. Here’s a scarecrow, here’s a witch, here’s a ghost, here’s a werewolf. In the same spirit the film’s groan-inducing decision to make the titular cursed silver the same stuff with which Judas was paid off and the absolutely inexcusable hash it makes of explaining why this matters complicates things for no apparent reason, leaving what might otherwise be straightforward genre fare a soupy mess of half-assed exposition. Ellis’s insistence on repeatedly connecting the film’s events to the rampage of the Beast of

Gévaudan are likewise totally lackluster and confusing.

Even at its most basic level Eight for Silver can’t bear scrutiny. Its characters quickly pass beyond the event horizon of believable stupidity, leaving doors open without a care, ignoring obvious mortal threats even after taking notice of them, and otherwise sort of standing in place until the plot lines up closely enough for the whole thing to lurch forward. I’m fairly sure there are serious continuity errors in its final act concerning the placement and possession of rifles, which seem to teleport wildly around the burning manor. Watching characters make mistakes can be incredibly compelling, but Ellis’s script is so flat, weak, and overwritten that there’s no sense of tension when someone misses a beat, no ratcheting up of the danger as some crucial detail is missed. Instead you watch a bunch of generic British people in gorgeously designed and broken-in period dress bumble around staring numbly at things, see a few beautiful shots of nature and riders on the hunt, and then it’s time for credits. What a bummer.